Facebook Will Peer Into Your Grocery Bag to Sell an Ad

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the unveiling of Facebook Home at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

Facebook has announced a new system that lets advertisers target you based on what groceries you buy, what car you drive, and what kind of phone you use. It’s just the latest example of an emerging pattern at the social network – follow the user all over the place to close more ad sales.

The bland name of Facebook’s new “partner categories” belies a bold mission: tying disparate real-world data to Facebook’s online social graph. The system allows Facebook advertisers to target groups of users based on loyalty card usage at grocery stores and elsewhere, based on public records like auto registration, and based on email addresses consumers give out at retail checkout registers. Facebook can access such information because it has partnered with companies that have spent years compiling the databases, including Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon.

There’s no question advertisers like to have “total informational awareness,” as this sort of data hoarding is called in defense circles. And for Facebook the approach is already winning it business, even from some early doubters. For example, after publicly pulling $10 million in advertising from Facebook a year ago, General Motors now says it is advertising on Facebook again using partner categories. It joins other blue chip companies taking advantage of the ad system, like Neiman Marcus and Pepsico.

But Facebook’s ultra-targeting raises the question of just how closely it can stalk consumers before such tracking gets creepy and alienating. Already, Facebook and its partners are selecting ads based on what other sites users have visited, what terms they searched for elsewhere, and what they put in their shopping carts during shopping forays at outside e-commerce sites. Facebook is also releasing a smartphone “apperating system” called Facebook Home, giving it the potential to follow movements and gather physical data – light levels, temperature, speed, whether pictures are being taken – as never before.

Facebook insists it’s not taking advantage of those capabilities on Facebook Home – yet. The system tracks no information not already tracked by Facebook’s mobile apps, says spokesman Fred Wolens, with one narrow exception: “We do collect information from a small randomized rolling subset of users about the App Launcher,” says Wolens. “We collect information on the apps you launch and when you launch them to help improve the product.” (As with other software products, Facebook Home is covered by the social network’s data use policy https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy .)

Facebook similarly underlines that the targeting in “partner categories” is anonymized and already used in other online advertising channels.

In other words, Facebook isn’t doing anything new, they’re just doing it more effectively than everyone else. If the social network is effective enough, it won’t have to worry about seeming creepy; once you hand over your money to an advertiser you have, by definition, forgiven any e-stalking that led up to that transaction. It’s extensive but ineffective tracking that Facebook needs to avoid. Like the college classmate that doesn’t know when to stop “poking’ your profile, nothing is more off-putting than aggressive and inept attempts at seduction.